New perspectives on Edinburgh Lamarckians and other transformist thinkers: evolutionary debates in the Athens of the North, 1790–1844

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Abstract

Recent scholarship has suggested that transformist ideas had a wider currency in
Edinburgh in the first half of nineteenth century than had previously been
acknowledged. The first objective of this study is to delve deeper into the reception
of transformist theories there in the years 1790 to 1844. The main figures whose
theories on the transmutation of species were discussed in contemporary sources
are Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), George-Louis Leclerc, Conte de Buffon (1707–1788),
Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844); this study therefore concentrates on the
reception of their work. The principle Edinburgh contexts in which the reception of
their theories is explored are the University of Edinburgh, the extra-mural medical
schools and the city’s various learned societies and scientific journals, although the
opinions of all those in Edinburgh known to have discussed transformism in this
period are considered. The sources examined reveal that transformist theories were
largely received with interest. Discussion of them was generally confined to
scientific, or naturalistic, arguments, except in the cases of some Evangelical natural
historians, who rejected them outright on theological grounds. This thesis also
explores how some thinkers in Edinburgh went beyond discussing received ideas
about transformism and developed their own theories, synthesising the work of
earlier thinkers. The most important of these were Robert Edmond Grant (1793–
1874), Robert Jameson (1774–1854), Robert Knox (1791–1862) and Henry H. Cheek
(1807–33). This thesis also explores the genesis of the later transformist theory of
Robert Chambers (1802–71), the anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation (1844), to establish to what extent he may have been influenced by the
earlier transformists of the 1820s and 30s. Events in Edinburgh in the 1820s also had
a wider resonance for the history of evolutionary ideas in Britain, as Charles Darwin
(1809–1882) was a student at the University of Edinburgh between 1825 and 1827. It
has long been suspected that his experiences in Edinburgh had a larger part to play
in the development of his theory of evolution than he later cared to admit. Careful
to avoid associating himself with the more speculative theories of earlier
transformist thinkers, Darwin made little mention of them in his published writings.
We already know, however, that Darwin had a close relationship with Grant during
his time in Edinburgh and must have been familiar with his transformist ideas. This
thesis aims to show to what extent the intellectual environment that Darwin found
himself in was suffused with the idea of the transmutation of species. In broad
outline, it can be concluded that transformism was much less controversial in
Edinburgh in the first half of the nineteenth century than might be supposed from
the prevailing historiography and had a significant number of sympathisers and
adherents.